I was excited to play SCHiM ever since I first saw a trailer at a Nintendo Indie World Direct showcase. They showed off a unique platformer where play as a shadow jumping to and from other shadows. The goal being to make it back to your person whom you’ve become estranged. The use of negative space as your means of traversal seemed intriguing to me and I was very excited to give it a try.
Manipulate the World Around You
Jumping from shadow to shadow can take some getting used to. SCHim is a 3D platformer in an isometric camera view so sometimes it can be a little hard to tell where you’ll actually land after a jump. That’s balanced by being as forgiving as possible. There’s no lives or dying in SCHiM. If you land outside of a shadow you just get reset back to the most recent shadow. This mechanic lead me to be so much more daring in how I played. I routinely tested jumps, not being afraid to just go for it. I found that to be way more fun than if I had to worry about running out of lives or having to start the level over.
The camera can be rotated to get better views and there’s a button you can press that points you toward your next goal. There were plenty of times where I was confused and didn’t know where to go next but rotating the camera showed me another path to take.
If you land outside of a shadow you can make one small hop to try to save yourself. This option can be turned off in the settings if you want to make it more difficult for yourself. I found it to be quite the saving grace and used it too often to consider turning it off myself.
If you jump to a shadow of certain objects you can manipulate them to help you along the way. Some signs can be stretched back to fling you farther than you can normally jump while some machinery can be used to extend shadows to bridge a gap. There’s plenty of people walking, cars driving, and animals moving about and you can ride their shadows to get an advantage.
Collectibles Aren’t Overshadowed
I happen to love collectibles in games and SCHiM doesn’t disappoint. When you pick up a collectible it opens up a new shadow to give you a new pathway. This can help open up a shortcut to help you along. What’s great is the level select screen shows how many of each collectible you’ve found in each level. You can go back to any level and go back to get them. Collectibles aren’t an integral part of the gameplay but it’s a nice feature to have that adds some replayability.
Sound Design
Sounds are important in a game. They can help us understand more about what’s going on around us. Hopping into a shadow produces a sound, almost like a “sploosh”, like water splashing into a larger container of water (I found that difficult to describe but I think you’ll understand what I mean). It’s incredibly satisfying and almost addictive to hear the sounds that each thing makes. When you go into a car’s shadow you can press a button to make it honk, bikes can ring a little bell, machines whirr and click, and animals make their particular sounds. It’s very clear that they spent a lot of time refining the sound design in SCHiM.
What a Colorful World
The use of color in SCHiM is some of the best I’ve seen. The color pallette is simple. Each level gets only 2 or 3 different colors, but that means that the colors absolutely pop. The contrast of the dark shadows against the bright colors also helps it be very clear on where you’re able to travel to. It’s a gorgeous art style and there aren’t really any other games that look quite like SCHiM does.
I played SCHiM via Steam on a Steam Deck OLED and the colors practically explode out of the screen on that device. If you’re gonna play this I’d recommend playing on an OLED screen if you have that available to you.
Performance/Issues
My only real complaint is that the game is fairly short. There’s dozens of levels but the entire game can be completed in an afternoon. There’s also an overarching story across the levels going through your person’s life from being a child to an adult. The story itself won’t knock your socks off but it’s interesting and doesn’t take away from the rest of the game.
I didn’t run into too many issues, however I did notice a hiccup here and there. I actually got stuck where a vehicle was supposed to move me to the next level but never did. Restarting the level fixed the issue and I was able to continue without any further problems. The Steam Deck is a fairly capable device but I can imagine a game like this running well even on a device like a Nintendo Switch.
All in all I had a lot of fun playing SCHiM and I highly recommend it.
SCHiM releases on July 18th on just about every platform. Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC via both Steam and Itch.io (with versions for Windows, MacOS, and Linux).
Gamer Social Club was provided a code for this game by the publisher.
